Stamp People

by Dan Morgan

All Larry Tieray wants to do is find the ‘good life’, but Larry is one of the ‘stamp people’ of America. Stamp people are like stray We see them during the day, we may briefly feel sorry for them, we have no idea where they go at night, and we forget completely about them as soon as they are out of our sight.
Larry tells the lively story of his life as one of the stamp people, and how he endures a ragged existence with no skill, with only a limited education, and an even more limited intellect. He’s been in prison, which is no big deal to him or people like him--it’s just a part of growing up. His family is His father never made an appearance in his life, his brother is autistic and institutionalized, and his mother is in prison on a double-murder charge that Larry ultimately learns was a strange sort of protection of the children she never seemed to care much for. Great color comes to Larry’s otherwise monochrome life when he finally realizes that having a family is really the good life he wants to live, and so he resolves to re-unite his mother, his father and his younger brother. He must do so however before his father’s new life forever takes him away from Larry’s, before his little brother’s descent into autism takes him forever away from reality, and before the State of Texas can execute his mother and forever dismember any chance for Larry to have that resurrected family which he wants most in the world. Though Larry may live a seemingly miserable life and frequently have to depend on the helping hand of sympathy to get by, he is neither an angry nor bitter man. He is a man who has learned to play with the cards he’s been dealt and never gives up hope that a better hand may someday come his way. In a deep, gray world, he still has an ability to see vivid color.

520 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 19, 2012

About the author

Dan Morgan (1925–2011) was an English science fiction writer and a professional guitarist, mainly active as a writer from the early 1950s through the mid-1970s. In addition to his fiction, he wrote two manuals relating to his musical profession.

Morgan is best known for his Sixth Perception novels, featuring a group of characters possessed of psychic powers; the three Venturer Twelve space operas, co-authored with his colleague John Kippax (a fourth was written by Kippax alone); and the somewhat tongue-in-cheek novel The Richest Corpse in Show Business.